I also recall playing Soldat a lot back in high school. I think there wasn't a Linux version available, which I guess is why I stopped. Perhaps one will appear now that it is open source?
I just came in comments to see is there a Linux build.
Now I know.
BTW, I found the screenshots at soldat.pl, but it would be nice to include a couple in the GitHub readme too.
Will do.
(Rereading the above I sound super critical. That was not my intention!)
When I started working on it, I was in school, and then started studying at a university, and continued working on it during most of my studies (and I think my studies somewhat suffered from it, as I spent way more time on coding on OLX than on studying...). But then I started a PhD, got full-time job, now got kids, etc...
Also, this is kind of an infinite project. You can always improve things, implement nice new ideas, etc.
For reference, repo is here: https://github.com/albertz/openlierox
The code you find there is already more modern than all the published builds. It is based on SDL2 now, and has lots of cleanups. The merge of the Gusanos engine and OLX engine is much more completed and cleaned up. Although this could still further improved. I would like to use Lua as the pure scripting engine (from Gusanos engine), and port over all the OLX game logic to that as well, so that the core engine becomes much simpler.
The graphics effects and drawing should be optimized further. On the transition to SDL2 and due to code cleanup, graphics has become slower. And it was already somewhat slow before. This is maybe not much a problem on a modern machine, but this game really should not require a modern machine to run nicely. One reason is that this is all purely software pixel based, including all graphics effects. We definitely should move to OpenGL, Vulkan or so, but some of the graphics effects are a bit tricky to re-implement, and probably need some shader logic. But we also want to have it cross platform, really running anywhere.
I think you refer to HawkNL, which is used for the low level networking (UDP/TCP sockets, DNS)? Yea, we definitely could replace that. Although we anyway provide our own fork within OLX, and it's not so special. One of the many things you probably could replace by sth more modern.
The (higher level) network engine is probably a more important item which needs a reimplementation to support more players, be more stable, etc.
OpenLiero (https://www.liero.be/) is a reimplementation as well. We planned to provide this (the game physics / logic / weapons) as another mod inside OLX. It already has some mods which are similar, but not exactly the same.
And many more things...
Once we added mouse aim support to OpenLieroX as well, but the Liero community didn't liked it, and basically it became another game. Network play between both versions would be unfair. It would really need a different name.
Teeworlds (https://www.teeworlds.com/) is also a more recent very similar game, also with mouse aim, and ninja rope.
Interesting also that Soldat is implemented in Free Pascal / Lazarus.